Email threads seem better for documenting and searching correspondence.
The last counter argument I read got buried on Discord or Slack somewhere.
The last counter argument I read got buried on Discord or Slack somewhere.
My experience with email is that people have subject lines, email explicitly identifies to and cc recipients; email is threaded; email often has quotes/excerpting/highlighting from prior parts of the thread.
On the other hand, most chat usage I see is dependent on temporal aspects for threading (people under-utilize platform features for replies etc), tagging is generally only done to ping people to attract attention, chat groups are frequently reused for multiple different purposes.
Leaping to a point-in-time within a chat stream is often a bad user experience, with having to scroll up and down through unrelated stuff to find what you’re looking for.
Stuff in email is just massively more discoverable for me.
This obvious assumes that who ever wrote the email isn't a madman, who insist on using emails like it was a chat.
While all of these features could in principle be realized in a chat system as well, in practice they don’t provide that flexibility and power.
Another usability feature of emails is that they have a subject line. This allows to meaningfully list emails in a compact fashion. In a desktop interface, you can easily view and visually grep 50 emails or more at once in a mail folder or list of search results (in something like Outlook or Thunderbird or Mutt). This allows working with emails more efficiently than with a chat view where you can only see a few messages at once, and only of the same thread or channel.
Yet another usability feature of emails is that each email has its own read/unread status. This, again, is facilitated by each email being its own separate data object, and by the separation between subject and body, which allows the read status to be unambiguously bound to “opening” the email, or to navigating in the list of emails alongside a preview pane. And you can mark any email as unread again. In chats, the granularity of read/unread is the whole chat, whether you’ve actually read all of it or not. You can’t easily track what you’ve read or not in an automated way as with email, other than by that coarse-grained linear time-based property of when you last visited the channel.
This is why, if something is important, I take it out of email and put it into a document people can reference. The latest and correct information from all the decisions in the thread can also be collected in one place, so everyone reading doesn’t have to figure it out. Not to mention side conversations can influence the results, without being explicitly stated in the email thread.
This is how things should be done, regardless of which medium is used to discuss the project. Without isolating and aggregating the final decision of each thread, there is no way to determine what everybody has agreed upon as the final product without looking back, which quickly becomes onerous.
Things get messy when you start having different versions of each feature, but that doesn't change the concept of using email/Slack/Discord/text/etc. for discussion and a separate "living" document for formalizing those decisions.
Here, ephemeral means "this conversation might as well never had happened", so why waste time on that?
Does that mean I can't have some pleasure in conversing about things? Of course not. But, I also enjoy some pleasure there from the low stakes and value that a conversation has. It should be safe to be wrong. If you have a conversation spot where being wrong is not safe, then I question what is the advantage of that over trying to adopt a legalese framework for all of your communication?
So now imagine such (idealized) HN threads transplanted to Discord or Slack. Same people, same topics, same insights, just unrolling in the form of a regular chat. All that value, briefly there to partake in, and then forever lost after however much time it takes for it to get pushed up a few screens worth of lines in the chat log. People don't habitually scroll back very far on a regular basis (and the UI of most chat platforms starts to rapidly break down if you try), and the lack of defined structure (bounded conversations labeled by a topic) plus weak search tools means you're unlikely to find a conversation again even if you know where and when it took place.
That, plus ephemeral nature of casual chat means not just the platform, but also some of the users expect it to quickly disappear, leading to what I consider anti-features such as the ability to unilaterally edit or unsend any message at arbitrary time in the future. It takes just one participant deciding, for whatever reason, to mass-delete their past messages, for many conversations to lose most of their value forever.
--
[0] - Especially that the traditional communication style, both private and business, is overly verbose. Quite like a chat, in fact, but between characters in a theatrical play - everyone has longer lines.
I think my mental model is more for chat rooms to take the place of coffee room chats. Ideally, some of those do push on something to happen. I'm not sure that forcing them into the threaded structure of conversations really helps, though?
Maybe it is based on the aim? If the goal is a simulacrum of human contact, then I think ephemeral makes a ton of sense.
I also kind of miss the old tradition of having a "flamewars" topic in newsgroups. I don't particularly love yelling at each other, but I do hate that people can't bring up some topics.
(I also miss some old fun newsgroups. I recall college had Haiku and a few other silly restrictive style groups that were just flat fun.)
I also confess this model of ephemeral conversation is amusing in this specific website. Which I also largely view as a clubhouse conversation that is also best viewed as ephemeral. But it is clearly held for far longer than that idea would lead me to think.
Funnily, this is the exact same issue I have with Slack.